Forrester Identifies Offline Support as 1 of 4 Key Factors in Building High Performance Mobile Experiences

On July 15th, Forrester published an important new report providing guidance for their clients on mobile business app development. The report, "Building High Performance Mobile Experiences" by Jeffrey S. Hammond and Michael Facemire identifies 4 key takeaways Forrester considers critical to building high-performing apps. Of the four key factors listed, Forrester placed particular focus on offline support.

Excerpt:

"…Many organizations specify "offline access" as a required feature of their app, but quickly remove that feature when the development teams responds with the estimate of what it will take to architect and build offline support. There’s no doubt that offline data synchronization is one of the most difficult challenges developers face when building multi-tier systems (and some would contend it’s never been completely solved). If your development team is considering it, know that it will greatly increase the perceived performance of your app…"

Forrester recommends: "Engineering client-side caching solutions for offline usage can be incredibly challenging, but the performance benefits are almost always worth it."

In the report, Forrester previews a soon-to-be-released report from Michael Facemire that will address the challenges of offline support and analyze three companies with emerging offline solutions, including Alpha Software.

Last month in its June 2014 report, "New Development Platforms Emerge For Customer-Facing Applications," Forrester included Alpha Software as one of six general purpose app platforms that address a wide range of web and mobile application scenarios. Forrester analysts John R. Rymer and Clay Richardson were among the analysts who highlighted Alpha Software as one of three vendors that is particularly strong for database applications. Several Alpha Software customers were interviewed for this report. Read more here.